Monday, January 4, 2016

Review: THE CHOSEN (2015) [Joe's Take]

Premise

The premise of The Chosen is absurd – a little girl named
Angie is possessed by Lilith (she-Satan) and her Uncle Cameron must sacrifice
six (SIX!) family members in order to free her. There are a few things to think
about here:

1) Six?
That’s a freaking lot. That’s one and a half nuclear families.

2) Everyone
is Catholic, so maybe it’s not that many. Still, six?? Damn.

3) Jesus,
six!

4) It’s
family members. It’s not vagrants or rapists or clowns (clowns would have been
a WAY better movie), it’s Grammie, Grampa, Mom, etc. SIX!

5) Is one
less than…

6) SIX! Good
grief. Why six? First of all, one is too many. A normal person would be like
“Devil is telling me to kill someone, but I’m not gonna do it, because I’m not
someone who kills people because the devil tells me to.” But in this case, an
uncle has to kill six family members in order to save his niece.

Story Arc

He does it! Cameron kills six family members in exchange for
the soul of one niece! Of course, the first one to go is Grandma. She’s
supposed to be easy, because she’s old, she’s weird, and she falls and breaks
her hip right in front of the bed where the smoke monster (Lilith, rendered as
CG smoke) lurks. The viewer is supposed to think “Oh, how convenient. How easy.
Phew!”

NO! It’s not EASY to feed your grandmother to a smoke
monster. You don’t do it. That’s a no. Grandma fell and can’t get up? She’s
probably going to die. You still don’t feed her to the smoke monster. You sit
with her, you cry with her, and you comfort her, because that’s your Grandma!
Grandmas are the best. Way better than nieces. What did your niece ever get you
for Christmas?

Anyway, he feeds her to the smoke monster. You don’t see it,
but you hear it, and it sounds a LOT like the Cookie Monster is eating Grandma.

From there, a significant bit of the arc is dedicated to an
attempt to kill the douchey Uncle Joey, who’s an unemployed, middle-aged mooch.
Except, as soon as they begin their scheme to kill him, he expresses how much
he cares about the little possessed girl, and comes off like a bro, rather than
a bruh.

While they’re trying to figure that out, the white relatives
show up (the family in this movie is ambiguously Hispanic). Cameron immediately
sacrifices the obnoxious WASP-y aunt to the smoke monster, and ties up her son
in the basement. I’m okay with this, because if you’re going to feed people to
a smoke monster, racism is a reason that at least puts you in some pretty good
company. But even racists don’t kill their own grandmas.

Then, the Uncle Joey discovers the bound and captive cousin
in the basement. Cameron throws bleach in Uncle Joey’s eyes and taunts him
upstairs, where he beats him with a bat and sacrifices him! WHOA!

He later sacrifices his grandpa to the smoke monster, just
to prove it exists to his mom, whom he also sacrifices to the smoke monster!

So this isn’t a movie about possession. This is a movie
about a psycho who kills his own family because the devil tells him to.
Normally, a movie would introduce some ambiguity to cause the viewer to wonder
if there really is a smoke monster, or if the protagonist is just insane. But
there’s no such nuance here, just “Welp, your niece is possessed, so you better
kill your Grandma, Grandpa, Uncle, Aunt, and Mom.” Doh, geez, well if I gotta…

So who wrote and directed this film? The director, and one
of the writers, is Ben Jehoshua, an Israeli who is also known for producing and
editing the TV series, Outrageous Kid Parties. The other two writers are Barry
Jay and Andrew Schepmann. Jay’s IMDB profile reveals that he has done nothing
other than co-write The Chosen. Schepmann’s profile reveals that he is 6’1’’ and likes to be called “Scheppy." In addition to The Chosen, he also wrote The
Apple Tree, a short film about an elderly queer man who has to go back into the
closet when he goes into an old folks home. Which is a pretty interesting
premise!

Unlike the premise of The Chosen, which is just garbage. And
it took three whole people to write this! Why not six?

Anyway, they did one thing right. One. The hero has a
girlfriend, and he gets her pregnant, and you just know that as he closes in on
killing the sixth and final family member, that Lilith is going to jump to the
baby and ruin everything, and then they’ll have to kill six more (because that
is more or less how Angie gets possessed in the first place).

But they turn the tables on you, because instead of
haplessly bringing the pregnant girlfriend into contact with Lilith, Cameron
intentionally brings her there, restrains her, and writes the
Lilith-summoning-sigil on her belly! He attempts to abort his child by smoke
monster! But just as your mind is reeling from the possibilities of how Lilith
will extract the fetus, the sigil disappears, because it’s not his baby! Move
over, Maury Povich!

Performances

Pure trash. The bro uncle is convincing as a douchebag, and
as a douchebag who actually cares. Oh, and the little possessed girl shows up
and does spooky stuff now and then. And there’s a nun who implores the hero to
kill everyone, and she really goes all out on the part. She is probably a
serious actor who has played many roles and really enjoys it. In fact, who
the hell is she? Let’s find out. It’s Penelope Richards, according to IMDB, and
this is the only thing she has ever done! Yikes.

Scares

At the end, Lilith comes out. Aside from CG smoke, she has
to be 100% of the special effects budget, and she’s a scary lady with a weird
mouth.

Otherwise, most of the spooky moments orbit Angie’s bed.
Anytime someone swings by there to see how she’s doing, she either coughs up a
hairball, strikes a spooky pose, or hisses. So, she’s like having a cat.

Questions for Paul:

JD: When
Cameron finds Angie at the bottom of the stairs, and her mouth disappears, and
he makes it come back by whipping the gunk off her face, do you think he saved
that gunk? I mean, what was that stuff? Could it be valuable? Would you have
kept it?

PH: I would have probably kept it.I keep everything.I’d probably keep it in one of those disposable
plastic containers that I hoard from taking home leftovers.That is, I keep leftovers, I keep the boxes the leftovers came in, and I keep mouth gunk harvested from possessed family members.But just to be safe, I'd probably put it in the waaaaayback of the refrigerator.

JD: Is there
a Hollywood hairball maker for movies like this? Because it seems like barfing
up ambiguous black stuff is all the rage.

PH: A google search yielded no hits for “Hollywood hairball
maker,” but I did learn that April 24th is “Hairball Awareness Day.”I think we should all thank this movie for
raising awareness about this important issue facing so many of us.Are you coughing up hairballs more frequently
than usual?Don’t wait to get it checked
out.You might be possessed by the
devil.Or you might need to stop
cleaning yourself with your tongue.

JD: What
would be an appropriate going away present for the pre-teen who is about to be
dragged to hell?

PH: Your first instinct would be to get her something nice and
fun, like a karaoke machine, so she can enjoy her final days in our mortal
realm singing and dancing up a storm!But most people don’t think about the eternity of burning hellfire that
she’s going to have to endure for, well, forever afterwards.So I think maybe a good-sized bottle of aloe
or Preparation-H would be more appreciated.Some kind of ointment, definitely.

JD: Why did
Lilith take the last soul? Did she just lose count?

PH: You got me.I never
understood why she would want any of the sacrifices, given that they were going
to banish her to hell (but doesn’t she like it in hell?).So she must be compelled to take the
sacrifices against her evil will.Isn’t
this bizarre?The human protagonist who
is supposed to be the good guy is sacrificing his whole family to her and she
doesn’t even want them! It’s like, you think they could broker some kind of
deal where she gets to hang out under the bed and he just won’t forcefeed her
the souls of his family.

JD: And if
she’s not already in hell, why is she all smoky?

PH: I think she would point out that it isn’t really smoke.It’s vapor.And she thinks it’s totally cool to vape in the kid’s room because no
one has really worked out vaping etiquette yet.